Out to Lunch

Out to Lunch with Sir Ian McKellen

Sir Ian McKellen, whose aeonian wizard, Gandalf, in the Tolkien movies has made him globally famous—The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be released this month—met me for lunch at Lucques, the award-winning restaurant in West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

It so happens that his contemporary Sir Michael Gambon (the only other actor in theater who can stand with McKellen on equal terms with Sir Laurence Olivier) also plays a famous wizard, in Harry Potter. “I often get mistaken for Dumbledore,” McKellen mentioned amusingly. “One wizard is very much like another.”

When the two met backstage recently, McKellen asked Gambon if he was ever mistaken for Gandalf. “All the time!” he replied.

“That’s good,” said McKellen. “And what do you do?”

“Oh,” Gambon told him, “I just sign your name!”

Sir Ian ordered lunch carefully. “I’ve made my decision,” he announced to the awed waiter, after studying the menu. “I’m going to have the shrimp salad. And then I’ll have the hake.” He has long since given up eating meat (and has actually never eaten a hot dog).

Now 73, Ian McKellen was born in the northern English mill town of Burnley and raised in industrial Wigan, the son of a father who was both a civil engineer and lay preacher. He was awarded a prestigious scholarship to Cambridge University after performing *Henry V’*s rousing “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” while standing on a chair before the stunned interview committee. He did little else at Cambridge but act in student productions and develop an unrequited crush on his fellow undergraduate actor Derek Jacobi.

As is well known, McKellen is a gay activist (who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for AIDS hospices with his one-man shows). Yet he didn’t come out until he was 49. “Do you regret that?” I asked.

“Yes. Because the minute I came out, I felt immediately better in every way. I felt relieved that I wasn’t lying. You know, when I was growing up in 1950s England, there were no gay clubs I knew about. There were no bars. Homosexuals were shamed publicly and imprisoned. You were on your own, looking over your shoulder all the time, hoping in the handshake of a stranger that he might be somebody gay.”

“Yet the theater has always been a tolerant haven,” I said.

“It’s probably one of the reasons I became an actor. I’d heard you could meet queers. So it proved. I was never closeted with friends and colleagues in the professional theater, but I wasn’t out to my closest blood relatives.”

Did it affect his career when he did come out? “There have been no negatives whatsoever. The first film role I deliberately chose to play after I came out was a raging heterosexual, John Profumo. I was just a little bit worried about whether I could carry off the bed scenes.”

He is a man for all parts—from his King Lear to Gandalf and the infamous mutant Magneto in the X-Men trilogy, to a fetching Widow Twankey in the popular traditional pantomime Aladdin at the venerable Old Vic, to a con man named Mel Hutchwright in 10 episodes of the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street.

The question is: Why Mel Hutchwright? “For the challenge, really,” McKellen explained. “Could I be at the same level as the actors who’ve been doing it for 40 years with no rehearsal?” (No problem.)

“Who haven’t you played?” I asked.

“There are dozens. But there isn’t one that I want to play. I’ve never played Malvolio. Well, not since I was 12 years old. But you never see a bad Malvolio. My only motive has ever been to keep working and try to do roles that I’m not absolutely convinced I can do.”

He has been repeatedly asked to play Falstaff—mythic “plump Jack,” Shakespeare’s guilt-free eternal child and conscience of the world. “I diligently read the play to see if I can find a way into it—but I can’t. I find Falstaff impenetrably difficult. It’s a pity.”

“I’d love to see your Falstaff,” I ventured.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he insisted. “It’s all the padding and stuff. But, you know, what I’m dying to do is a part that’s not yet been written. Something new.”

He hasn’t yet appeared in a musical, however. “But I can’t really sing,” he said.

“That’s never prevented actors from appearing in musicals before.”

“No,” he replied. “But it prevented my enjoyment.”

Then I mentioned that, when Sir Alec Guinness was offered the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, he thought it was beneath him and turned it down. But he accepted eventually and became even more famous (and a millionaire)—which only made him feel worse.

“I think if you want to avoid the Guinness dilemma, don’t do the job,” McKellen said. “I have no problem about being in something which is extremely popular.”

He’s clearly no cultural snob. “I’m a snob about standards,” he explained. “But I don’t find anything odd at all in being known for playing Gandalf. I couldn’t be happier about it. Other people tend to get snobbish on my behalf. ‘It must be dreadful to always be thought of as Gandalf,’ they say. Well, I can’t always be thought of as Richard III!”

At which he ordered dessert and cheerfully imagined the inscription on his gravestone: here lies gandalf. he came out. “That would do it! We needn’t mention Macbeth.”